Weak Seed and a Poisoned Land

Environmental Humanities , 2018

Six years after the ceasefire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Lebanese indicted the remains of Israel's weapons for contaminating their lands, stunting their crops, and making them sick. Against local and international discourses claiming inconclusive evidence and uncertainty about the toxic effects of the war, my southern Lebanese interlocutors insisted on causally linking Israel's weapons to the perceived surge in cancer, infertility, and environmental degradation since 2006. Their insistence that war was causing this ongoing bodily and environmental malaise exposes the slow violence of war and challenges the liberal idea of war as a temporary event and paroxysm of violence. Taking southern Lebanese accounts seriously reveals how the liberal idea of war keeps Israeli weapons, toxic environments, and embodied pathologies causally separate and restricts what gets counted as a casualty of war. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article approaches the confirmed and suspected toxic remnants of war as toxic infrastructures that sediment and distribute war's lethal potential, years after the last bomb was dropped. Building on local accounts of the 2006 war that emphasize enduring environmental toxicity and its gendered effects, this article argues that southerners deployed their embodied knowledge of toxic infrastructures to contest the uncertainty about Israel's weapons and to produce new truths about the war. Southerners thus disputed liberal assumptions about the end of the war, challenged normative understandings of war casualties, and enacted new ethical frameworks for recognizing the belated injuries of the 2006 war.

American Ethnologist, 2022

In South Lebanon, war is lived as landscape, environment, milieu. Those pursuing life in such quarters do what they can to make-live, and their lifelines are often as vitalizing as they are deadly: tobacco farmers ally themselves with what they call a "bitter crop" that flourishes in an arid war zone, while pastoralists walk in explosive fields with their mineevading goats. These multispecies alliances flourish because they can survive the deadly infrastructures of war. Dwelling alongside two steadfast families in the borderlands of South Lebanon, this ethnography of life in war moves away from tropes of trauma to grasp a militarized world from within the lived terrain of its operations. Neither greentinged utopia nor total devastation, these resistant ecologies make being possible in an insistently deadly region. Thinking life from disastrous war zones forces anthropological theory to reckon with harsh ethnographic realities while bringing to light unsung alliances of hope for life ongoing.

2013

A Landscape of War: On the Nature of Conflict in South Lebanon Munira Khayyat This dissertation is an inquiry into the naturalization of war. It examines forms of life in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield through an ethnographic exploration of the intertwining of war and everyday living on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. Life in these parts, for the most part, revolves around tobacco farming, olive cropping, goat herding and other forms of agricultural practice generating subsistence and income and underpinning an ongoing presence in place. The southern borderland is also entangled in an ongoing war condition that cyclically erupts, disrupts, destructs, (re)constructs, and has done for generations now. War in South Lebanon has come to be inhabited as “natural”; it is by now a part of southern life, or better yet, insistently generative of a kind of life that continues – in whichever ways and outside of moral judgments – to be viable here. My inquiry unfolds as a j...

This paper relies on ethnographic and archival research to narrate the humanitarian trouble in finding trauma in the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The humanitarian inability to easily locate a visible trauma shared by war-affected communities intersected with other political, social and public health debates on the modern ways of suffering from war and violence in 2006 Lebanon. This paper provides a preliminary reading of these debates, as I argue that trauma, whether defined and framed by psychiatry, psychology and humanitarianism as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or evoked in popular Lebanese culture and discourse to express suffering, takes many material, political and ideological values for different stakeholders and communities in Lebanon. This multi-faceted meaning of trauma in Lebanon, sometimes intersecting, other times clashing, provides us with an understanding of the contemporary politics of suffering from violence in Lebanon.

In this article, I elaborate on the constant anticipation of violence that runs deep within society in Lebanon. My objective is to think of the mundane locations of violence, and how we come to live the violence in and through ordinary times; my motivation here is to inquire into the different ways people experience war and its aftermath. I also explore the ways that violence is present and implicated in the ordinary rather than the two being mutually exclusive. The anticipation of violence becomes a way to think through regular mundane encounters of everyday life in states with protracted conflict. I analyze this anticipation of violence by looking at select ethnographic encounters from my fieldwork, and specifically during a time of sporadic bombings over several months in 2007.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2009

Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone, but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. But the commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice.

2018

US-led military forces have repeatedly used toxic munitions and everyday military practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, introducing known carcinogens, teratogens, and genotoxins into the environment without adequate transparency or remediation. Counter to dominant frames problematizing militarized toxicities as merely medical-epidemiological or environmental, I develop the concept of toxic violence to name state violence which employs or produces toxic exposures as weaponry, tactic, or by-product. I analyze the ways in which toxic violence is produced by an uneven field of intentionality, and structured by systemic political and economic factors. I also address the persistent evidentiary dynamics of research and discourse on its health effects. Tracing the multiple ways it defies conventional frames for assessing damage, I analyze how toxic violence constitutes an ongoing, self-replicative form of harm, and press critical questions toward refiguring accountability for its unfolding aftermaths.

Peace & Change, 2019

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2021

This article traces the infrastructures of suffering under the governance of humanitarian psychiatry to explore how material conditions of war and aid have shaped the politics of trauma and sumud [steadfastness] in Lebanon. Based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2011 to 2013, I look at the expert, economic, and techno-political assemblages of trauma and sumud during the July War in 2006 and the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. Mental health experts faced unexpected difficulties in diagnosing war trauma during the July War. This led political actors to claim that these difficulties reflected a general absence of suffering from war and a sign of Lebanese resilience, drawing on economies of sumud in postwar reconstruction. The Syrian refugee crisis however radically transformed the politics of suffering in Lebanon. A new political economy of trauma emerged where the Lebanese now competed with other aid communities to have their past suffering recognised as traumatic. Comparing the relations between violence, aid, and suffering in both instances serves to contextualise and historicise suffering beyond a particular discourse or event. It also serves to highlight the contingencies of suffering rather than its internal and psychic elements.

[This essay first appeared on the LA Progressive website on 10/17/2024.] In Israel’s present year-long war against Hamas (in Gaza) and its recent attack against Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often claims that Hamas and Hezbollah sometimes use or operate within civilian buildings like schools and hospitals. Thus, Israeli attacks destroying some of these structures--and civilians within. Collateral Damage is the claim. But I’ve concluded that Netanyahu and those who support him do not feel the tremendous pain and sorrow of civilians enough. They do not use their imaginations enough; they are not empathetic and creative enough to maintain Israeli security by less deadly means. Among political leaders Netanyahu has not been alone since 1914. As writer Wendell Berry said in 1968: “We have been led to our present shameful behavior in Vietnam by this failure of imagination, this failure to perceive a relation between our ideals and our lives.” In 1948, General Omar Bradley said, “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace.” Today, more than three-fourths of a century later, his words are still true.